Yet when they returned to the sitting room, Cyril had vanished. So had one of the tumblers. It was a large house, much larger than the couple needed with the children gone, and by the time they finally located his body in the tool shed, it was too late.
* * *
In the immediate aftermath, Kay couldn’t bear cooking for herself, and when the casserole from the Samsons ran out she actually ate most of the leftover bangers and mash—which kept quite well, as the cream in the potatoes had been fresh. But she didn’t have the option of a long, inert bereavement, because their savings were shot, and her pension couldn’t cover the massive remortgage. By mid-May, property transactions were allowed again, and moving house was a useful distraction—although Roy was most unpleasant about the sale, whose proceeds he’d been counting on to finance a protracted dissolution after his parents’ passing. Disposing of most of their things was painful at first but a relief in the end, and shifting into an efficient one-bed flat in Kennington allowed for meeting the divorcee next-door—who on hearing the story of her widowhood (a story she might have deployed with a trace of manipulation; it made her interesting) declared appealingly, “I’m not sure what impresses me more: him going through with it, or you not.” To her own surprise even more than the children’s, she took up with Ellis within the year, because at their age an extended courtship was a long walk on a short pier. The new relationship was neither better nor worse but different; you couldn’t replicate a long-standing marriage of fifty-seven years, but Ellis was less, as the kids said, “controlling,” and let her take the lead, even when she made the radical proposition that they knock down the wall between their flats. Her high blood pressure became more challenging to manage pharmaceutically when it began to alternate erratically with low blood pressure, but she learnt to have a lie-down when she felt faint, and one of the liberations of age was not having to worry about the underlying reasons some system of your body was on the fritz, because if that didn’t go wrong then something else would. The right shoulder grew worse, but she got surgery, which was largely, if not altogether, a success. The toes were a more enduring torture, but it turned out that those mobility scooters were a right laugh, and she and Ellis conducted races down the halls of their tower block, becoming even peskier tearaways than the youngsters on trick bikes in the car park. Attempting to make a light at Elephant and Castle one afternoon—witnesses tsked that the pedestrian signal had long before turned red, but Kay on her scooter had become a proper daredevil—she chanced her arm once too often and was sent spinning into a lamppost by an archetypal White Van Man. The end wasn’t “quiet,” as Cyril had once promised, but it was quick. She was ninety-two.
3
White Van Man Redux
Kissing Cyril’s top knuckle and giving his palm a squeeze, Kay slipped off to the loo—within whose privacy she felt a surge of the same last-minute fickleness, fecklessness, mischief, and caprice that had drawn her hand to the “wrong” box on the ballot paper in 2016. She was suddenly sorry she hadn’t smashed that plate when the peculiar urge had been upon her, if only as an expression of the very agency that Cyril expected them to exercise before the night was through. As an efficacious substitute for shouting Opa! and pitching her wedding china against a wall, she withdrew her phone from her pocket and tapped the messages icon. There was no guarantee that the gesture would be availing, but Cyril had claimed that they were making a “calculated gamble,” and in the spirit of a poker game Kay was introducing a wild card.
Yet, thumbs poised, she remembered how Hayley herself had expressed exasperation with her mother’s marital passivity during the girl’s childhood. The two had conducted fruitful heart-to-hearts about the fact that, as a member of the dismally christened Silent Generation, Kay hadn’t been gifted with the self-respect that women Hayley’s age took for granted. It was thanks to her daughter’s encouragement that she’d stood up to Cyril when she wanted to enrol in that degree course at Kingston. (Her husband had considered it a dereliction of duty to retire from the NHS at fifty-five, and strenuously urged that she stick out ten more years. He’d dismissed interior design as “frivolous.” It had been quite a showdown.) Tonight, placing her fate in the hands of fortune—effectively tossing a note in a bottle into the cybersea, on the off chance that a passing beachcomber picked it up—was no more dignified than leaving the decision entirely to her husband. After all, what punchy slogan won the referendum for Leave? Take back control.
“Now, listen here,” Kay said back at the table, pushing the cork back in the unfinished bottle of cabernet and giving the stopper an extra party’s-over shove for good measure. “This evening has been great fun in its way, but it’s also a complete nonsense, and I’m calling time.”
“Sorry. What are you on about?”
People often employ incomprehension not as a means to clarify what you did say, but as a demand that you say something else. “This is a charade and a ridiculous charade at that. This pantomime of ours is made all the more daft by the pandemic. Here we are playing at poison-pill-popping, whilst the world outside our front door is battened down in terror that they’ll all get sick and die. Supposedly this dismal lockdown is expressly to protect the so-called vulnerable, meaning old people just like us. Ignoring younger people’s sacrifices on our behalf and popping our clogs on purpose—well, it seems ungrateful. It would be one thing if
